Convince Me

Casually raising an idea among your peers. Disagreeing with your manager in a high-stakes meeting. Sending an email to get your whole team on the same page. What do all of these scenarios have in common? Your knowledge and expertise are only a fraction of what determines whether you’ll convince your audience. We’ll walk through a few core building blocks of effective communication and convincing that will get you the rest of the way there. You’ll leave this talk with tactics you can put to use immediately.

A high-performance culture is critical to a company’s success – leading to higher rates of innovation, customer delight and employee satisfaction. But how do you achieve this in a company as large and diverse as Microsoft? How do you steer hundreds of engineering teams, of all shapes and sizes, with varying levels of process maturity, toward a more DevOps-centric, agile engineering culture? In this session, Cindy Alvarez, a leader in the One Engineering System (1ES) team shares how Microsoft approaches culture change as well as learnings from her team’s journey to help internal teams become high performing teams.